Writing Samples

E-commerce makes baby steps into practicality.

Like many things that have been over-hyped and misunderstood in the so-called Net economy, e-commerce has recently seen a kind of coming of age. This, despite the fact that banks and other financial institutions in Canada continue to have cold feet when it comes to merchant accounts for online store proprietors. E-commerce companies have begun to appear which promise to help merchants over this hurdle by supplying them with complete solutions which can include shopping carts, secure processing — and even merchant accounts!

So, why is getting your online storefront set up so hard? Well, at every stage, an online storefront relies on the smooth operation of your shopping cart application, the security protocols in place to collect your customer's credit card information and the bank or payment gateways that finally drop the funds into your merchant account — before anything gets shipped to the customer.

To understand the role of each of these elements, let's compare them with shopping in the real world.

Customers wander around conventional stores accumulating movable durables (products) which they store in a wheeled receptacle (shopping cart). In the electronic equivalent, the shopping cart is an application deployed by your Web site developer. This cart not only keeps track of all the information you want to show up at checkout time but also tallies up the total cost of the items selected.

A shopping cart solution can be as simple as a link that, when clicked, passes the customer into the secure processing area with the price of the item in tow. Shopping carts get more sophisticated as they provide more flexibility to the store administrator. Most commercial shopping cart apps let you customize item descriptions based on size, flavour, colour or whatever product features you wish to flag.

Some e-commerce solutions run this kind of function entirely on the solution provider's server via a password-protected area on your Web site. Others let you build your site offline using templates and wizards and then upload it all at once. The latter type of solution is favoured by many small business owners as it lets them customize their store without the cost of professional programmers and without having to have special services running on their Web host's server.

Once customers have chosen their purchases, they head to the checkout where the cashier tabulates the total cost of the purchases and helps them part with the correct amount of hard-earned cash.

At the Web store, the visitors who have reached the 'paying stage' of their online shopping experience will be shown a list of the items in their carts one last time giving them one more opportunity to put things back. If everything is fine, customers are passed into a secure area where their credit card information can be safely processed and their shipping addresses recorded before being directed into the final screen. There, taxes are calculated based on the province or state in which they live.

By this stage, there is a 'magic number' that represents the total amount of money that the customer is about to spend including costs related to the chosen shipping method. This amount is then passed, with the credit card number, to the credit card processing system which deposits the funds into the merchant's bank account.

In the early days of e-commerce, this kind of transaction required a merchant account which would have had to be specially arranged through a bank or trust company. These accounts have always carried expensive fees and required large security deposits. Payment gateway companies now allow merchants to circumvent the banks and set up other secure options that basically perform the same service — getting customers' credit card payments into their pockets. While there are fees and security deposits are still occasionally involved, these services are nowhere near as costly as their financial-institution counterparts.

So, e-commerce services continue to grow and develop to meet the real needs of business owners large and small. I predict that getting your business selling online will only become easier as more shopping cart products and gateway services continue to appear to help guide the consumer dollars to merchants' pockets.

Our 'Online resources' section, below, has all the details.

Shopping cart solutions:
ECBuilder
http://www.multiactive.com/
smbiz/ecbuilder/
Some Web-based solutions:
Yahoo! Store
http://store.yahoo.com/
Cool Cart
http://www.coolcart.com/
Payment Gateways (Canadian credit card and merchant account processing alternatives to your bank.)
http://www.psigate.com/
Cardservice International -
http://www.i-axis.com/
Click-Pay
http://www.clickpay.net/
The E-xact Advantage!
http://www.e-xact.com/